Poems 1959-2009 Read online

  The snow turns into sleet.

  The sleet turns into smoke.

  Eat a heart for a treat.

  It is sweet.

  It tastes like meat.

  I turn toward the east and bow five times.

  One puff of white smoke signifies the College of Cardinals

  Has found a new pontiff.

  The vote flutters like a moth

  Above the roofs of Rome.

  Venice looks like an atoll from the air.

  It rises like a ring seal from the sea.

  It rises like the famous corno ducale,

  The hydrocephalic jeweled hat the doge wore.

  His swelled head is a helmet made of brocade but hard as horn.

  Mr. Delicious has started his descent with tray table stowed.

  Seatback restored to its original upright position.

  Finally he is standing again

  On one of the many bridges,

  On the arched back of a footbridge filigree,

  After all the years away,

  After all the terrible miracles

  And heart attacks of joy.

  The Venetian canal water

  Is hydraulic-green brake fluid

  That runs through the veins

  And embalms this exalted dead city.

  It is incredible that they have to die.

  The Nazis appear to know why.

  The evidence suggests that they do.

  Oh the smokestacks.

  Oh the smokestacks in full view.

  No one knew.

  Oh the chimneys spew Jew.

  Let me take a moment to talk about sex sounds.

  These are the sounds Germans make when they are making love

  When they are about to come.

  This completes, thank you very much,

  This year’s

  Report of the Paris Cricket Club.

  MU’ALLAQA

  FOR IMRU’ AL-QAYS

  The elephant’s trunk uncurling

  From the lightning flashes

  In the clouds was Marie Antoinette,

  As usual trumpeting.

  The greedy suction

  Was her tornado vacuuming across the golden Kansas flatness.

  Meanwhile, the count was talking to the swan.

  The swan liked what he was saying and got

  Right out of the pond.

  Meanwhile, grown men in Afghanistan.

  The count had fought in Algeria.

  Meanwhile, neon in Tokyo.

  Madame la Comtesse waved to us from the top step,

  Waved to her count, their swan, their ornamental pond, et moi.

  We were a towering cornucopia

  Of autumn happiness

  And gourmandise rotating counterclockwise,

  Backwards toward the guillotine.

  I kept a rainbow as a pet and grandly

  Walked the rainbow on a leash.

  I exercised it evenings together with the cheetah,

  A Thorstein Veblen moment of conspicuous consumption:

  A dapper dauphin in a T-shirt that said FRED

  Parading with his pets decked out in T-shirts that said FRED’S.

  I left my liver in the Cher.

  I ate my heart out en Berry.

  We drank and ate

  France between the wars,

  And every morning couldn’t wait.

  It felt sunshiny in the shadow of the château.

  And when the rainbow leapt from there to here,

  It landed twenty years away from the Cher.

  The place it landed was the Persian Gulf.

  It landed twinkling stardust where I’m standing in my life

  With one-hump Marie Antoinette, my wife,

  Who resembles that disarming camel yesterday.

  In fact, the camel yesterday was smitten.

  She left the other camels to come over.

  You have a lovely liquid wraparound eye.

  She stood there looking at me sideways.

  They feed their racing camels caviar in Qatar.

  The ruler of Dubai has said that he will try to buy Versailles.

  A refrigerated ski slope, five stories high,

  Lives improbably inside a downtown shopping mall in Dubai.

  Arab men, wearing sneakers under their robes, hold hands.

  Faceless black veils stop shopping to watch through the glass.

  Seeing the skiers emphasizes the desert,

  Like hearing far-off thunder at a picnic.

  Both the word thunder and the word picnic are of course Arabic.

  Indeed, Arabic was the language of French aristocrats

  Before the Terror, bad body odor perfumed.

  It is the language of the great Robert Frost poems,

  Which have the suicide bomber’s innocence

  Walking safely past the checkpoint into the crowd.

  They pay payola to Al Qaeda to stay away from Doha.

  The emir was in his counting-house, counting out his oil and gas.

  Another sunny Sunni day in the UAE!

  A candidate for president

  Who wants to manumit our oil-dependent nation

  First has to get the message to every oily girl and boy

  To just say no to up and down and in and out, labanotation

  Of moaning oil rigs extracting oil joy.

  My fellow Americans, I see a desert filled with derricks

  Pumping up and down but never satisfied:

  Obsessional hydraulics and Jimi Hendrix has hysterics.

  I smash my guitar to bits onstage and that’s all, folks!

  It isn’t.

  I contemplate the end of the world. It isn’t.

  I have my croissant and café and the Trib and walk the rainbow

  Around the block.

  The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues

  Contemplate the end of the world.

  I contemplate the end of the world but in my case

  It’s not.

  There are still things to buy.

  I walk the rainbow in the dark.

  The world is the kiosk where I get my Herald Tribune.

  The world is my local café where my café au lait is quadroon.

  I go to the strange little statue of Pierre Mendès-France

  In the jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, France.

  I make a pilgrimage to it.

  My quaint political saint and I visit.

  The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues

  Contemplate the end of the world, which isn’t

  The end of the world, though yes, quite true,

  In Algeria and Afghanistan

  Jihad is developing a dirty nuclear bomb

  That smells like frangipani in flower

  To keep Frangipani in power.

  Ayatollah Frangipani has returned from his long exile in France

  To annihilate vice.

  I stomp the campfire out and saddle up my loyal Mayflower—

  Who is swifter than a life is brief under the stars!

  My prize four-wheel-drive with liquid wraparound eyes!

  We ski the roller-coaster ocean’s up and down dunes.

  We reach land at last and step on Plymouth Rock.

  DARKENING IN THE DARK

  I woke in the middle

  Of the night in Nevers, Frawnse.

  Nuhvair.

  I was a tornado funnel spinning across

  The American Midwest in the center of France,

  In the dark with my jet lag and my childhood.

  I wrote in a bedside notebook, with the light on:

  “The song is singing.

  Meanwhile, grown men do their work.

  The animals that live outdoors go on.

  The rest of us won’t even cross the street to vote.”

  With that, I turned back into fleshless smoke and slept.

  No one my age can go on living for long.

  No one the co
lor of a turnip

  Can be anything but

  Caucasian with a problem—

  With his liver or his sunblock—

  Or a chameleon Caucasian darkening in the hotel room dark.

  My metabolism was a lot younger in the Cher,

  Near here, when I lived there.

  I breathed away the lovely tons of alcohol

  From the night before in the freezing morning air.

  There was the crisp sweet of wood smoke from the château.

  My dog and I barked frost when we laughed.

  Never spend the night in Nevers,

  Unless you came with the team for the race at Magny-Cours.

  The hotel is unspeakable,

  But the circuit is nearby. Manny Coor.

  Many languages there were barking frost,

  And not all of them in English.

  Life is a tour dechauffe for the living.

  Life is a warm-up lap,

  As if it were never too late.

  Nehvur.

  You rode the wheels off,

  And now it is time to start.

  THE DEATH OF ANTON WEBERN

  I attend a concert I can ruin

  In hear-a-pin-drop Zankel Hall, a Webern program I’ll turn blue in

  Trying not to cough. I suck on cough drops, sips of bottled water.

  Webern’s pinpricks sound a lot like silence, waiting for the slaughter.

  These days I gasp for air. I can’t control my cough.

  So far no friend of mine has died. So far. Whoever’s first will start us off.

  The cough is like a barking guard dog, lunging on a chain, frantic to attack.

  I’m coughing hard enough to break my back.

  I lived for thirty years on Kools, unfiltered Camels, and Gauloises.

  I’m coughing on a tightrope high above the oohs and ahs.

  For thirty years a prince inhaled the razor arrows in his quiver,

  And then he felt her arms around him and her hot breath made him shiver.

  You smoke your face off for three decades and it nearly guarantees

  Non-small cell lung Ca with some emphysema, please.

  I’m crazy about big breasts—real or fake—the opposite of pinpricks.

  My subject has always been death and breasts and politics.

  An American G.I. shot Webern dead in Allied-occupied Austria just after the war.

  Poor Webern had stepped outside at night to smoke a cigar.

  I hear the pin drop. It is a miracle that one can hear at all.

  It’s almost comical the way the subway rumbles under Zankel Hall.

  The N and the R throb through the pinpricked silence everyone hears.

  The riders on the trains are presumably in tears.

  The children on the trains hear the Webern and start sobbing.

  The women on the trains passing under us are throbbing.

  The pin drops. The Lord be with you. I hear it.

  The man who killed him starts to drink too much. And with thy spirit.

  The war is over and there’s no more war.

  His son-in-law has given him a fine cigar.

  He’s going to step outside for nicotine and tar.

  The door’s ajar.

  WEIRDLY WARM DAY IN JANUARY

  I’m waiting in my urine specimen in the cup provided.

  The busyness of dizziness sweep-second-hands the waiting room.

  Every time I see God it’s the same shock of sight.

  The same violin of feeling.

  Such a shock to see that God the Father is a goddess.

  She stands unstained inside a long white coat.

  I’m waiting in the abattoir.

  I’m waiting for spring to come.

  It walks in off the street. Spring, please have a seat.

  The doctor will be with you shortly.

  The music starts to play

  The violin I’m playing.

  I want to feel your breasts, Lord.

  I want to start the stem cells.

  The White House is prepared

  To fly me Mach 3 to an undisclosed secure location.

  PAIN MANAGEMENT

  I’m a liar with a lyre. Kiss me, life!

  Even if I vomit

  When you try to bring me back with mouth-to-mouth.

  Even if the mouth-to-mouth

  Vomits in my mouth, it’s life!

  A fellow in the elevator

  Jokes about global warming and it being 84°

  Outside. But what did you expect? It’s late October!

  The corpses put out leaves.

  Leaves don’t leave the trees. New Guinea in New York.

  The Caribbean nannies in the park are savage sausages

  On cell phones.

  Boudins noirs. Blood inside a casing. Caretakers.

  The children stand around in little cages, waiting whitely.

  The Caribbean nurses at the hospital are expressionless bone

  Nose rings behind the white Formica counter

  When bed 229B calls the Nurses Station a second time, a third time.

  It is too early to give the poor woman more morphine.

  The masks hide the heart

  Inside each human being’s head. A liar with a lyre.

  The nurses in the park ignore the ruin they’ve got slumped

  Next to them on the bench—and talk on their nonstop tom-toms,

  On their cell phones that are jungle drums.

  The old on their walkers inch forward inside their cages

  With their nurses. The nurses at the hospital are expressionless

  Behind the Formica in 5 Central when 229B

  Howls this time, but really howls.

  She will get something

  When the pain management guy

  Rounds with his team.

  And the dog walker doesn’t walk the dogs.

  He sits on the curb not doing the job.

  His innocence flotilla on leashes surrounds him

  Like a parachute on the ground

  After a landing, panting.

  The pure of heart stare at Adolf Hitler with their honest eyes.

  Poor United States of America.

  The nurses stand outside the hospital on their break

  Where they can smoke.

  These ones are mostly white, wearing green.

  There’s something about the sight of nurses lighting up.

  Do nurses think nurses are protected?

  They inhale the horn of the charging rhino.

  I also do impersonations

  Of righteous persons.

  My righteous fall like rain,

  And grow like grass.

  I impersonate myself. I’m a liar with a lyre.

  Sto mentendo.

  (I’m lying.)

  A man still wearing his solar topee

  Is being boiled alive in a jungle pot.

  Needless to say, the man is white.

  With one chop, the Aztec priest splits open the Spanish captive’s chest

  And, reaching inside, yanks out the still-beating heart,

  Which he sets on an alabaster plate, and which God starts to eat,

  Who, needless to say, is wearing a solar topee.

  Needless to say, needless to say,

  Never mind what I’m saying,

  I’m lying.

  It’s my physical therapist friend at the other end of the telephone trying.

  To tell me something crying.

  Her husband is back in the hospital, not dying.

  But with his whole left side suddenly paralyzed.

  The doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian don’t know why.

  It is exactly as if he’d had a stroke—though he is young.

  But his speech and cognition are unimpaired.

  But he can’t even use a bedpan or sit up in bed.

  Art throws the dog a bone.

  I am ashamed of my poem.

  DO YOU DOHA?

  A river
of milk flows gently down the Howard Street gutter

  Because it’s a fine warm day in Sag Harbor

  And someone upstream is washing a car.

  I picture a Texan—Christian name Lamar—

  Who snips off the end of a Cuban cigar

  And lovingly lights up in Doha, Qatar,

  Which young oilmen like him pronounce Doha, Cutter.

  It’s the Salt Flats of Utah in the Persian Gulf, but utter.

  The emir is richer than melted butter.

  Bumps and bubbles of white snot in the bone marrow look like an ice flow of hot,

  The way the universe was just before it expanded a lot.

  You never know what disease you’ll get, or you’ve already got.

  It’s your asteroid coming to get you, only for now it’s smaller than a dot.

  I’m an aging boy. I never grew up. I’m glued to the spot.

  Adam in Eden is summertime Gloucestershire,

  But riding to hounds in winter is really the glory here.

  If it’s strictly speaking illegal these days to chase a fox, they do not care.

  If life is a matter of daring to do, they dare.

  Lamar flies like the wind on the one he likes, the fiery mare.

  She jumps a fence.

  She doesn’t care if it makes sense.

  She leaps a ditch behind the pack.

  Her thundering insolent brilliance will only attack.

  I am thinking of your bad back and the stunning diagnosis.

  I google multiple myeloma. I brace for the prognosis.

  Yesterday you found out.

  The sun rose today and the birds in the trees woke with a shout.

  The Sag Harbor Tree Fund will plant many more memorial trees, no doubt.

  I wouldn’t recommend Stage III multiple myeloma.

  The patient ends up screaming or in a coma.

  Yes, the remissions can be quite exciting.

  The question is, who is doing the accepting and who is doing the inviting.

  Irrepressible plasma cells chitter-chatter away on their cell phones

  While malignantly breaking your bones.

  I personally would rather have non-small cell lung Ca.

  Isn’t that a wonderful name, itself a medical-language holiday?

  Here’s a pun—It took my breath away! Lung cancer? Breath away?

  Outside, I can see through the window it is actually a nice day.

  In the American manner, a visitor leaving the Visitors elevator says, Have a nice day!

  I think of the Stradivarius fiddle I held this morning that made me want to pray.

  I used to play.

  That’s what I’m trying to say.

  Act your age!